Daniel Biss, state senator representing north suburban district, Democrat running for governor, Jewish, modestly observant, says “it’s important to live as if there isn’t” an afterlife.

Born in Akron, grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, parents on the music faculty at Indiana University.

“I found myself at some point falling in love with mathematics . . . obsessed with . . . math,” and ended up on math faculty at the University of Chicago — “my dream job.”

***

Entered politics because “it felt like the country was spinning out of control, we were rushing off to war in Iraq, and it didn’t feel good enough to just hang out in the math department and solve problems that I personally found very interesting but didn’t have much connection to the kind of social unrest that was going on.”

Running for governor because “our state’s in trouble, and people are hurting.” Blames incumbent Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, as well as “a long legacy of broken machine politics” on the part of Democrats.

***

At home, growing up, there was “a lot of talk about public policy and fairness and how society ought to be structured,” but “we were describing something, not doing something.”

***

He’s Jewish, almost 40, and his mom grew up in Israel, her own parents from “a Transylvanian town on the Hungarian-Romanian border.” Grandmother survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, and grandparents moved to Israel after World War II.

For some people, “I think, if you’ve seen what they saw at a young age, it’s difficult to come out of that . . . with a lot of concrete faith in a benevolent God.”

They retained and passed along “a deep sense of Jewish identity” but didn’t have “a strong sense of ritual observance or literal belief, necessarily.”

***

His father’s side came to the United States from Europe before the war, his grandparents “kind of traditional ’30s European, left-wing Jews who . . . had kind of a Marxist view on religion.”

***

Once his maternal grandmother visited when he was fasting as a kid for Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and she chuckled and said something along the lines of, “Why would you do that?”

***

They’d go to synagogue just a few times a year, a “modest observance.”

Where is he today in terms of practice?

“Pretty much where I started.”

His wife isn’t Jewish, and they’re raising their kids “with a modest level of identification with Judaism.”

***

Is there a God?

“I don’t know, I believe in people . . . and I think there’s something special and magical in the human spirit.”

***

Is there a place for faith in politics in Illinois?

“When I first started running, I went to see my rabbi, and he said something that I will never ever, ever forget. He said, ‘Daniel, I can’t stand it when Jewish candidates come around to the Jewish community and say, effectively, vote for me because I’m Jewish. If you want someone to vote for you because you’re Jewish, you should be comfortable with the idea that somebody else is going to vote against you because you’re Jewish.’

“I just think that’s so right . . . so correct . . . There is a place for morality and ethics and a kind of a sense of community in politics. In fact, that’s the point of politics. And many of us have those senses shaped by our faith. But, then, if you bring the faith into politics in a way that’s exclusive of somebody else, that’s just dead wrong.”

***

Blames Democrats and Republicans for the “transactional political system” of politicians “dividing the pie for themselves.”

***

“To me, the biblical themes that are the most powerful are the themes of redemption.”

***

“I think of science and religion as fundamentally not touching.”

Respects people who take a literal view of Bible stories, but he chooses “to view it as metaphor and parable and a very powerful set of stories that can help you live better if you study them carefully.”

***

Some Catholic leaders again are advancing the idea of tax credits for parents whose kids go to parochial schools. Where does Biss stand?

“I think it’s terrible,” he says, because it erodes the commitment to public education.

Daniel Biss: “There is a place for morality and ethics and a kind of a sense of community in politics . . . . But, then, if you bring the faith into politics in a way that’s exclusive of somebody else, that’s just dead wrong.” | Santiago Covarrubias / Sun-Times

http://serve.castfire.com/audio/3386372/3386372_2017-08-13-182112.64kmono.mp3?ad_params=zones%3DPreroll%7Cstation_id%3D3757.mp3]]>http://chicago.suntimes.com/football/hoge-jahns-podcast-talking-qbs-and-more-with-bears-gm-ryan-pace/feed/0podcastpaceLutheran scholar Martin Marty on faith, Luther, the state of religionhttp://chicago.suntimes.com/news/lutheran-scholar-martin-marty-on-faith-luther-the-state-of-religion/
http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/lutheran-scholar-martin-marty-on-faith-luther-the-state-of-religion/#respondFri, 11 Aug 2017 16:30:41 +0000http://chicago.suntimes.com/?post_type=cst_article&p=667291Photo: Max HermanLutheran scholar Martin Marty on faith, Luther, the state of religionLutheran scholar Martin Marty has a new book on Martin Luther, says Luther's view that repentance should be a lifetime thing might sound “grim” but was meant to be “a joyful thing,” amounting to “a change of heart.” | Max Herman / Sun-Times]]>

Martin Marty, Lutheran pastor, retired University of Chicago professor, author, has a new a book on Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” as 500th anniversary approaches, believes that a new Reformation, spanning denominations, would have to focus on “a recovery of love and justice.”

That’s when Luther’s “95 Theses” came out — challenging certain Catholic teachings and practices, including people paying money to shorten time away from God in “purgatory,” seen as a sort of middle-space between heaven and hell.

Luther’s writings asserted “that the Bible is the central religious authority and that humans may reach salvation only by their faith and not by their deeds,”according to one summary.

They fueled the Protestant Reformation and helped change the course of Western civilization.

Luther’s legacy is vast and varied, according to Marty, including “this idea of free access to grace.”

Luther, a Catholic friar, believed that bibles, church services and songs should be in the language of — and therefore accessible to — regular people. In Catholicism, Latin was the universal tongue.

He wrote numerous hymns.

***

Marty’s father “was a teacher in a Lutheran parochial school, and he was an organist and introduced us kids to Bach.”

Marty, 89, grew up in “a little town” in Nebraska, with fewer people than now live in the downtown high-rise where he and his wife live.

“You were either a Czech Catholic or German Lutheran, and across the county line were the Czechs who didn’t go to church.”

***

After ordination, Marty was a minister at a Lutheran church in River Forest, then got involved in starting a new church in Elk Grove Village as the northwest suburb sprouted.

“Seven years later, we had a thousand kids in Sunday school.”

He walked door to door asking whether people attended a church. “I don’t think once the door was slammed on me.”

If somebody already was a church member somewhere, Marty moved on, as “the ethic was you don’t steal at all” from other denominations.

***

He started out in the Missouri Synod branch of Lutheranism, switched to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

***

At one time, Marty says, the largest Lutheran parish in the country was on the West Side, in Austin.

***

He loved being pastor of a congregation.

“The most moving things I’ve had in my life are dealing with the dying.”

***

While there are “vibrant” Lutheran congregations — and growing memberships overseas, in parts of Africa, for instance — church attendance and clergy numbers are suffering in parts of Europe and the U.S., as with many denominations, Protestant and Catholic.

There have been other periods of religious decline in U.S. history, he points out: “It comes and goes.”

Will attendance and membership swing back? “Selectively.”

“The mega-churches are still prospering . . . but it’s not the formula that’s going to work everywhere.”

***

“I think the bigger problem is not atheism, it’s indifference.”

***

Martin Marty: “The most moving things I’ve had in my life are dealing with the dying.” | Max Herman / Sun-Times

Many of the disagreements between the Lutheran and Catholic churches have eased or evaporated, though the faiths still view the Eucharist differently.

A Catholic priest wrote the foreword to Marty’s new book.

***

Luther advised praying at the start of the day and at the end, when “you repent of what you’ve done wrong . . . and then you go to sleep . . . quickly and cheerfully.”

“In a funny way, it works: Every day you mess up and you say, ‘I don’t have to carry this another day.’”

***

Marty has been active in “social justice” causes and marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement in the Deep South.

He says that, for King, “The biggest victory was when you got a sourpuss to join the movement.”

***

Nowadays, there’s so much “polarization” within religions, between those with different religious perspectives, in the political arena, he says.

“When I see all the grimness in the church, every denomination . . . I think that the Reformation . . . today would have to be a recovery of love and justice.”

Amber Stocks, Chicago Sky coach, grew up in nondenominational Christian congregation, mom a choir director, dad a church administrator: “I don’t think you can open up a science book and see the wonders and have doubt of the existence of a magnificent loving creator.”

In first season coaching the WNBA’s Sky, played basketball herself at the University of Cincinnati, previously was an assistant coach at college and pro levels.

Came from a large family in Ohio that played sports, including sister Tamara Stocks, a former WNBA player. “Basketball is, and was, a huge part of our family.”

At 6-feet-8, her dad, James Stocks, played for the Kentucky Colonels in the old American Basketball Association.

“I wouldn’t say he pushed basketball on us, we all gravitated towards it, and it was something that we all could do together. So, on any given Saturday morning, you would see all of us out on the driveway.”

***

“We grew up in a Christian home, and faith, worship was not just a Sunday thing. It was every day. And so going to church on Sundays was never anything I dreaded as a child. I looked forward to it.”

Between choir, business meetings, bible study and services, her family “was always there . . . The church often became the playground.”

Faith “was just a part of our lifestyle: If you offend somebody, you make amends, and you ask for forgiveness. And if you owe somebody something, you pay ’em back, and you tell the truth . . . Love your neighbor as yourself.”

“In college, I would say because of . . . my exposure to so many different people . . . and sports gives you that,” she had an “open mindset” about attending different Christian denominations.

“It was more about what the actual messages were that the pastor or the minister was sharing, and so I might have a stint at a Methodist church . . . a Lutheran church . . . Church of God in Christ.

“The denomination has never been a priority to me. It’s been the message.”

***

The kids in her family sometimes stayed up late on Saturdays, and that meant one Sunday her sister was tired and fell asleep at church.

“We nudged her to wake her up, and she yelled at the top of her lungs, ‘Hallelujah!’ ”

The congregation had been quiet, listening to a sermon.

“We could not stop laughing.”

***

Stocks, 39, has two kids.

***

Her dad would cite a bible verse for “comfort” if there was a “rough patch” during the basketball season.

One parable that “was always shared” — and not just in a sports context — emphasized that people should not “bury” their talents.

***

Being a coach is not just a career to Stocks but “a ministry.”

“To empower, to encourage, to edify, to uplift — which sometimes means to challenge or to admonish.”

***

“There’s a bigger picture than just winning,” such as “trying to share and lay nuggets along the road that can help somebody on whatever path that they are on.”

***

Amber Stocks during a Sky game last month against the Dallas Wings in Rosemont. | AP

“I never felt the . . . urge to pray before a basketball game . . . I never prayed for wins . . . Prayer was a part of life, not . . . basketball.”

***

What does God look like?

“You, the chair, the tree, the cat walking down the street, the rock that somebody’s using to hold something in place, and nothing. He looks like everything, and She looks like nothing. And She looks like everything, and He looks like nothing.”

***

A bible passage that’s “become a fabric of my identity” is the one that begins, “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial.”

***

“When we’re children, we’re just open to so many possibilities . . . Your soul is open, your mind is open.”

***

“There are certain gifts that everyone has, and then what do you do? Do you cultivate that and grow that into something magnificent, or let it lay by the wayside?”

***

“The world we live in today, there are so many tools and vehicles that we have to receive and be fed spiritually, whereas years ago the primary way . . . was to go to a church service.”

***

“Ministry as a vocation is one type of ministry,” but it’s also “the love you show at the cashier at the grocery store who’s struggling and everybody else is being rude.”

]]>http://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/chicago-skys-amber-stocks-denomination-not-as-key-as-the-message/feed/0FAITH-080617-8PODCAST: Did the Bulls hit the button on a rebuild too soon?http://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/podcast-did-the-bulls-hit-the-button-on-a-rebuild-too-soon/
http://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/podcast-did-the-bulls-hit-the-button-on-a-rebuild-too-soon/#respondMon, 31 Jul 2017 18:12:03 +0000http://chicago.suntimes.com/?post_type=cst_article&p=655316PODCAST: Did the Bulls hit the button on a rebuild too soon?]]>]]>http://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/podcast-did-the-bulls-hit-the-button-on-a-rebuild-too-soon/feed/0Butler2Halas Intrigue podcast: Bears’ Kyle Long, Danny Trevathan talk returnshttp://chicago.suntimes.com/football/halas-intrigue-podcast-bears-kyle-long-danny-trevathan-talk-returns/
http://chicago.suntimes.com/football/halas-intrigue-podcast-bears-kyle-long-danny-trevathan-talk-returns/#respondFri, 28 Jul 2017 15:17:59 +0000http://chicago.suntimes.com/?post_type=cst_article&p=652640AP PhotosHalas Intrigue podcast: Bears’ Kyle Long, Danny Trevathan talk returnsBears guard Kyle Long at practice. (AP)]]>In the latest Halas Intrigue podcast, Kyle Long and Danny Trevathan discuss their returns from injury for the start of Bears training camp:
]]>http://chicago.suntimes.com/football/halas-intrigue-podcast-bears-kyle-long-danny-trevathan-talk-returns/feed/0Kyle Long‘Hood’ and ‘holy’ minister: Not alone ‘even when you make bad choices’http://chicago.suntimes.com/chicago-politics/united-church-of-christ-minister-marilyn-pagan-banks-not-alone-even-when-you-make-bad-choices-face-to-faith-podcast/
http://chicago.suntimes.com/chicago-politics/united-church-of-christ-minister-marilyn-pagan-banks-not-alone-even-when-you-make-bad-choices-face-to-faith-podcast/#respondThu, 27 Jul 2017 16:57:34 +0000http://chicago.suntimes.com/?post_type=cst_article&p=650793Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times‘Hood’ and ‘holy’ minister: Not alone ‘even when you make bad choices’Rev. Marilyn Pagan-Banks wants to “reconnect” people, including those in gangs, “back to their core goodness. I tell the guys, ‘If you can hustle and stand on that corner 4, 5 o’clock in the morning every day, you have work ethic.’ . . . We just need to transfer that into something positive, right?” | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times]]>

Marilyn Pagan-Banks, United Church of Christ minister, born in Chicago, raised in Cleveland, pastor in Humboldt Park, activist in Rogers Park, runs anti-hunger group, counsels gang members, believes “it’s not too late for anybody.”

Director of A Just Harvest in Rogers Park, which started as soup kitchen, now also works to eliminate causes of hunger, poverty.

All three places aspire to be a “sanctuary in terms of having folks feel like they belong, like they can . . . exhale from the things that they’re dealing with in the world . . . trying to overcome lives of poverty . . . criminal activity . . . addiction, those kinds of hard things in life.”

***

Of Puerto Rican heritage, “I was raised with my father and a stepmother. My father decided he wanted to take me away from my mom and raise me in Cleveland . . . Really, I was kidnapped as a child. I laugh when I say that ’cause people think I’m joking, but I’m not.”

“It was a good thing, though. My brothers grew up in Humboldt Park and ended up in a lot of gang activity . . . So I think, the bigger picture of things, it was better that I was raised with my dad in Ohio, even though I missed my mom.”

Ran away as a teen, ended up in a group home where the adults were “very affirming” and “trusting.”

She made a promise to herself: “When I grow up, I want to help kids like they helped me. That kind of led me into ministry.”

***

As a single mom, sent her kids to day care at a United Church of Christ church in Cleveland. Ended up active there — in bible study, choir.

Having been raised Catholic, “I had no idea what it meant to be a Protestant.”

After a couple of years, the pastor told her, “You know you’re a member of this church, right?”

He suggested that Pagan-Banks — who’s now 50, with three children and seven grandchildren — become a minister.

But she went to seminary in Hyde Park, was ordained in 1999 and stuck around Chicago.

***

“As a child, I had a recurring dream that I was following Jesus through this wooded kind of forest, very pretty, but a lot of trees, and never quite catching up. But He would always check to make sure I was still there.”

***

Believes it’s important to “walk” with others, “not wronging them or shaming them . . . being with them and letting them know that, hey, even when you make bad choices, you’re not alone, you still matter.”

***

“God knows your whole story . . . God will never stop loving you.”

How love is “expressed through works of justice and being open and affirming people’s humanity and gifts and possibility — that’s what draws me to the UCC.

“Love shows up. It’s not just how you feel, but it’s action, right?”

***

“I woke up to the sounds of gunfire last night.”

Two young men were once shot in front of her nonprofit in Rogers Park, near Howard Street. The window was shot out. It was fixed, but her group left the bullet holes in the blinds as a reminder.

Wants to “reconnect” people, including those in gangs, “back to their core goodness.”

“I tell the guys, ‘If you can hustle and stand on that corner 4, 5 o’clock in the morning every day, you have work ethic.’ . . . We just need to transfer that into something positive, right?”

***

“There’s a lot of assumptions that these are coldhearted, reckless, non-caring people. But that’s not true. They hurt, and they cry . . . like everybody else.” There’s also “a remorse . . . kind of weight of the things that they’ve done to cause harm.”

***

“We cannot ever give up on anybody. We come from a tradition of redemption.”

***

“I do believe that God has a preferential option for the poor.”

***

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus was “kickass, and he was an agitator.”

***

“I still like to have fun. I think it’s OK to have tattoos.

“I have this tattoo that says ‘Hood’ and ‘Holy.’ ”

A pastor saw it and said, “You’re trying to go from one to the other?”

She says: “I’m still both . . . I want to be grounded . . . but that we are called to a sort of higher purpose.”

http://serve.castfire.com/audio/3377345/3377345_2017-07-19-151845.64kmono.mp3?ad_params=zones%3DPreroll%7Cstation_id%3D3757.mp3]]>http://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/hoge-jahns-podcast-analyzing-the-bears-defense-before-camp/feed/0leonardfloyd1Author Patrick T. Reardon: ‘Embrace the pain of life as well as joys’http://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/author-patrick-t-reardon-embrace-the-pain-of-life-as-well-as-joys/
http://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/author-patrick-t-reardon-embrace-the-pain-of-life-as-well-as-joys/#respondThu, 20 Jul 2017 17:20:00 +0000http://chicago.suntimes.com/?post_type=cst_article&p=636709Author Patrick T. Reardon: ‘Embrace the pain of life as well as joys’Writer Pat Reardon: Brother who committed suicide “had lots of demons. I’ve had lots of archangels.” | Rich Hein / Sun-Times]]>

Patrick T. Reardon, longtime Chicago writer, out with a new book of poems on faith, family and the death of his brother, raised Catholic in Austin, believes not running “away from the hard stuff” is a “kind of prayer.”

“Lived my whole life in Chicago. Grew up on the West Side,” now living on the North Side in Edgewater.

“I’ve been a writer actually since I got my first byline at the age of, like, 11.”

Went to Catholic school, and “the nuns had us all do these essays” for Father’s Day. “And then, suddenly, they tell me they put mine in for this contest, and I got in the local newspaper.”

Reardon, 67, was the oldest of 14 kids.

“My father wasn’t, like, John Glenn,” the astronaut, “and he wasn’t a big powerful mover or shaker, but he took care” of us.

“Austin at that time was a real blue-collar, Irish neighborhood,” with a lot of cops and other city workers.

***

“The priests were the intellectuals. . . . I liked church, I liked the gold and the paint and the silver and the smoke and the incense and the flames and all that. And also I realized that the priest was, like, a powerful guy in the neighborhood. He was like the alderman or the committeeman.”

Went to the seminary with thoughts of becoming a priest.

“Part of it was the status thing . . . Part of it was the art thing — to be in church, where it’s just very beautiful . . . And part of it was just a general sense of wanting to do the right thing and to help people.

“I left four years before ordination . . . It was a celibacy thing” — he wanted to get married some day.

***

Believes that, “absolutely, women, gay people” and married men should be allowed to become priests.

“I really respect women and gay people and anyone else who’s on the margins who stays in the church because they really understand what the church is about . . . You’re there for service.”

Has written books including “Love Never Fails — Spiritual Reflections for Dads of All Ages,” “Woven Lives — One hundred years in the story of the St. Gertrude faith family” and, most recently, “Requiem for David“(Silver Birch Press, $14), which includes poems he wrote after his brother David’s 2015 suicide.

“We were brothers and never figured out what that meant,” reads part of one poem.

Another goes:

“We are only boys still

though you are ashes in an urn

and I carry years like demons and archangels on my shoulders.

Remember the smell of the incense at Mass?

You are incense now filling my church

with strange aromas.”

***

David “had a troubled life, and part of my book is looking at why his life was troubled” and wrestling with their upbringing and why they took separate paths and how their now-deceased parents played into all of this.

Reardon’s brother became “adamantly anti-religious and talked about how stupid it was . . . ‘If you couldn’t prove it, it didn’t exist.’ It wasn’t the sort of thing where he wanted to hear my side.”

Reardon remains a churchgoing Catholic.

Even though “faith is rooted in doubt,” it “somehow helped me on my road, and his refusal to believe, not just religious faith but lots of other kinds of faith, was a reason . . . he went down his road, I think.”

***

The process of therapy and writing poems “has made me even more aware that in order . . . to fully embrace the richness of life, you have to be willing to embrace the pain of life as well as the joys . . . You can’t really get to . . . high joy without knowing deep and bad pain.”

“Writing the poems are a prayer . . . Everything you do in life” in which you’re “trying to be as real and present as you can is a kind of a prayer.”

Like visiting a friend with cancer, rather than just reciting something in your head.

“To not run away from the hard stuff . . . that, to me, is much better as a prayer than saying some formulaic thing in the pews.”

***

David’s death in some ways made Reardon’s faith deeper because, he says, “I looked deeper at all these questions,” though there are “some angry things” in the book in which he asks God “why didn’t you take care of him when he was alive.”

Steve Sarowitz, 51, Chicago tech entrepreneur, Paylocity founder, philanthropist, raised Jewish, now Baha’i, which teaches there’s “essentially one faith being revealed over the history of humanity.”

Raised in Homewood as a Reform Jew.

“I had a pleasant upbringing in the Jewish faith . . . We were the three-day-a-year Jews.”

“Wasn’t passionate” about his religion, but “I was always a believer in God.”

When he was a baby, his mother had a “life-after-death experience” in which she said she “went through a tunnel,” saw flashbacks and was asked by God whether she wanted to stay there or resume her life.

To the extent he contemplated faith, wondered: “Are the Jews right and the Christians wrong, or are the Christians right and the Jews wrong, or maybe the Muslims are right?”

***

First encountered the Baha’i religion — which today, according to estimates, has at least five million adherents, many in the Middle East — while a student at the University of Illinois.

He went to the Jewish student center during a presentation on “progressive revelation,” learned about “the Baha’i vision that . . . one God sent all the messengers, all the founders of all the great faiths with the same essential message, which is to love God and love thy neighbor and that the differences” among the major religions “were rather minor and that it was, in fact, one faith being revealed over the entire history of humanity.

“The idea of unity and continuity . . . a single reality . . . made sense to me right away,” though he didn’t become Baha’i yet.

***

He and his wife raised their kids Jewish, but he revisited the Baha’i faith years later when a running buddy asked him to join a Baha’i “study group.”

Wealthier after Paylocity, the human resources and payroll provider, went public in 2014, decided to do “a lot more” philanthropy and heard about a plan to put a community center for Arab and Jewish kids in Akko, Israel — the “spiritual center” of the Baha’i religion, to which the faithful worldwide face during daily prayers.

Sarowitz considered it a sign and helped, visiting Akko and the shrine of Baha’u’llah, who died in 1892 and is viewed by the faithful as the “latest” of God’s “divine educators” — among them Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad.

“I had a profound spiritual transformation . . . I was already a Baha’i in my heart, but I walked out teaching the Baha’i faith.”

***

“The main tenet, the most overriding value in the Baha’i faith, is unity, unity of religion, unity of mankind. It’s trying to take away all the things that divide us . . . getting rid of all prejudices . . . sexism, racism, nationalism. Baha’u’llah had a beautiful quote, he said the earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.”

***

How often do members go to services?

“Very rarely.”

But there’s a minimum of one “obligatory” prayer to be said daily.

Baha’i members in individual towns in the Chicago area get together for a “feast” — to pray together, eat together, handle “community business” — every 19 days, the length of a month in the Baha’i calendar.

Part of country’s best-known Irish-Catholic clan, rooted in Massachusetts, but “I’ve been here for about 31 years” after meeting his future wife at Boston College and following her “back to her hometown . . . like a little puppy.”

With four kids, they “have a great life in a state that we love.”

Wife’s parents live nearby, and they “help . . . reinforce” the “little stuff” with his children — firm handshakes, looking people in the eye — as well as “bigger lessons” like, “It’s better to win than to lose, but it’s better to lose than to cheat.

“It’s great having another set of adults share those values with our children while we’re raising them. And I’d like to be able to do that with my own grandkids . . . Unfortunately, the kids that are our children’s age” — college-age or older — “they’re leaving the state” for better opportunities and “optimism.”

Wants to “reset the direction of the state” and foster an “environment” where talent is retained and attracted.

“There was a time of great optimism. We grew up with . . . priests who were part of our family . . . hero priests . . . champions of Catholic social justice.”

Among them: Robert Drinan, a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War who ended up in Congress, and Geno Baroni, who was active in civil rights and helping the poor.

“That’s the Catholic Church that we grew up with and we continue to want to be a part of.”

It was “cataclysmic” when two influential American cardinals tried to dampen that type of church activism, and Kennedy felt “some alienation” as a result.

***

With his father and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, both murdered while in politics, “I think the fear’s probably present in everybody’s heart about what I’m doing.”

***

Mother instilled “in us a great sense of faith. We . . . said prayers every morning . . . prayers together as a family every evening after dinner . . . Our dinner was ended every night with one of us reading a story from the children’s Bible.”

Went to mass Sundays, but “the regular confession piece wasn’t such a big part of our lives and, frankly, for some of my brothers and sisters, that might have overwhelmed the time constraints of the parish priest.”

Kennedy’s high school and college were run by priests from the Jesuit order.

“I don’t believe in a God that’s separate and apart but one that’s present to us in that Holy Spirit. I feel like I’ve seen the Holy Spirit at work in my mother’s faith and in the changes that have occurred in my lifetime around social justice issues.”

***

“I think that notion of a ‘cafeteria Catholic’ is demeaning and . . . disrespectful to the different traditions that I believe are a legitimate part” of the church. “Anyone who tries to push” that label “on me, I’ll push back in a robust way.”

***

Was faith a factor in running for office?

“I think faith very much drives my considerations.”

Sees the state’s budget crisis and its impact on social service agencies and the vulnerable people they try to help through a moral lens.

***

Ethel Kennedy and her husband, the then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, beam with pride as they leave St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Boston in 1963 with baby Chris for their Hyannis Port summer home. | File photo

Did his father’s death have an impact on his faith?

“I don’t know that that event was as determinant for me as the reaction to it I saw,” particularly in his mom, Ethel Kennedy, and grandmother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Through their faith, “they were able to survive a set of circumstances that would have probably overwhelmed any other human being.”

His mother “didn’t withdraw, she wasn’t crushed by that event. And, in many ways, her faith allowed her to proceed, and I think that lesson was the powerful lesson.”

He prays “regularly,” says it’s “more of a dialogue.”

***

To him, God looks like “other people.”

***

In Chicago, there’s sort of a “brand” of Catholicism here “that’s very unique,” influenced by local seminary leaders decades ago who “encouraged” priests “to be active” in social issues.

***

Should women be allowed to be Catholic priests?

“Certainly, any one of my four sisters is as capable of giving a sermon that’s moving and powerful as perhaps any priest that I’ve heard, and since they preach at me regularly, I can say that.”

***

He likes St. Paul’s writings about embracing special “gifts” from God in service to the community.

***

Doesn’t like politicians here and elsewhere “co-opting” religious leaders, sometimes appointing them to government jobs with the intent of diluting criticism – or encouraging praise – from the pulpit.

“I hear a lot of law enforcement staff . . . say they didn’t sign up to be mental health staff. Well, I didn’t sign up to be in law enforcement, but the two have found their way to each other.”

***

Tapia’s friends’ and family’s interactions with the criminal justice system when she was young “influenced my path.”

Her dad was arrested for drugs and sent to prison.

“I developed this desire to just want to help people who were incarcerated and their families because I knew what that felt like.”

What did it feel like?

“Not knowing what’s happening with your loved one who is behind this dreaded wall, and you don’t understand what is occurring. You’re lost.”

Attributes her career success in large part to her parents, “even though we had a very difficult upbringing . . . I remember having Sunday dinners — this was when prisons were much different, you could take food in to them.” Her mom would spend Saturday cooking, then they’d take picnic baskets to visit her father.

***

Raised Catholic, “we went to church every Sunday, my mom, my sister and I. I went to my catechism classes, and we just had a wonderful church family. But I also recognized I had different portrayals of spirituality in my home than what I think many young African-American, in particular, children experience.”

Walking in to her childhood home, there was “a large picture of Jesus, and he was black” with “long, flowing, gray hair.”

“For me, it showed . . . that God was in me despite all of these things going on around me. I knew that I was His child.

“My dad was adamant that his children were going to grow up with figures that looked like them, from our Barbie dolls to our toys to our picture of Jesus.”

***

Cook County Jail warden Nneka Jones Tapia: “Today, every day, I read my Bible in the morning, and I say prayers for me, my family and for our community. That’s my ritual every morning, and that helps ground me.” | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

Mass could be boring, but she liked her family’s routine of going out to eat at McDonald’s after.

In college, started to develop “my own sense of spirituality. That’s when I started to explore and . . . going to more Southern Baptist churches . . . just to experience what others felt. And I remember being moved the first time I went to a Baptist church and heard the choir sing.”

She was baptized and spent several years in that tradition, eventually moving on, not attending services much, but digging into the Bible on her own.

“I had more resonate with me when it was just me and God in the room.

“I started out not understanding what I was reading. It was very difficult . . . Then, it just grew on me.”

***

“Today, every day, I read my Bible in the morning, and I say prayers for me, my family and for our community. That’s my ritual every morning, and that helps ground me. It helps me start my day on a positive note, which you can imagine is pretty difficult. So, if only for 15 minutes in my day, it’s me and God, still, at my house.

“I have a corner at my house that I have a vision board, and I have a nice prayer that I say and my Bible and my candle.”

***

Did faith drive her into this field?

“It is more rooted in a commitment to my community. I see so many black and brown children, really they’re children, come in and out of correctional institutions. And Cook County is no different. And I know we need to do something different to help them. They are hurting, and I just have this unyielding commitment to wanting to make life better for them.”

Why?

“I think it’s multifaceted, it’s spiritual, it’s hearing my dad in my ear saying we come from kings and queens, and that’s how we should project ourselves,” and also her mom’s work as a nurse.

Tapia’s first name means “mother supreme” in Igbo, an African language.

“I was very fortunate to have the outcome in my life that I had and so many people don’t.”

***

“I think God is all around us,” including at the jail.

“I have pictures on my phone, and one of them is of a man. He is first coming into custody, and he’s behind a wired fence . . . a holding area. Older, white man. His face is down, his cane is hanging up on the wire, and he just looks like he has no hope, no sense of a desire to want to go on.”

Another photo, though, shows inmates “in their brown Department of Corrections uniforms playing drums, smiling. To me, that’s God — to take someone” from such a low point and “transitioning them to that smile.”

***

Cook County Jail. | Sun-Times files

There are “hundreds of religious volunteers that come in to the jail and offer an array of spiritual services” to detainees, including Muslims, Jews and Christians.

Some inmates participate in religious services at the jail simply to “get out of the tier” for a while, but often “they even get something out of it.”

Faith can be transformative for inmates. “I also believe it depends on” if they’re “ready to make a change.”

There are 10 divisions at the 90-acre-plus jail site and a half-dozen non-denominational chapels.

“Oftentimes, when you walk by a cell, you’ll see Bibles in the window sill.”

Bibles, Korans and Muslim prayer rugs are donated, and special food is available for those with religious dietary restrictions. “We do have kosher meals.”

Of the 7,500 or so inmates, “I would say about . . . 30 percent” attend “a religious service at some point during the week.

“There are some that just aren’t interested, and that’s OK as well.”

***

A favorite Bible passage is about Joshua and his army “marching around Jericho . . . and God spoke to him and kept telling him, ‘Keep going,’ and finally the city just fell to him. And so that’s inspiring to me because so many days you feel like you’re not making headway . . . a difference,” but eventually you do.

Another favorite story has Jesus “amongst those . . . deemed criminals,” and there were those worried, saying something to the effect of, “You shouldn’t go, you shouldn’t go,” but Christ said, “I’m OK.”

“My family worries about me, people that don’t even know me. . . . To those people, I say, ‘I’m OK, this is what I was supposed to do.’ . . . I was destined to be where I am now.”

***

Nneka Jones Tapia used to think of heaven as “above the clouds . . . Now, I see heaven on earth.” | Frank Main / Sun-Times

Used to think of heaven as “above the clouds . . . Now, I see heaven on earth . . . I believe that each of our heavens look different. For me, my heaven is when I get home and I see my husband,” who works at the jail as a correctional officer, “and I get to talk to my stepsons.”

Is the jail — a place teeming with people, awaiting trial, often accused of horrific crimes like murder and rape — a version of hell?

“While no one wants to go there by any means, I’m sure, I don’t see it as horrendous. I see it as a place that can be used for someone’s benefit, if they allow it.”

“We, in the free society, we don’t often times get an opportunity to quiet our world and to really think about what steps we need to take to have the best life,” something they can do in the jail.

***

“I try not to let the job infiltrate me, but I try to put myself into the job, but there are those moments and those people that just hit you in your core, and I pray for those people.”

Enlists St. Jude, patron of “hopeless cases,” in her prayer routine.

***

Redemption is a central element of Christianity. Does everybody in jail deserve forgiveness?

“I don’t believe that’s for me to say.”

With violent crimes, “there are victims . . . If that were my loved one . . . it would be difficult for me to forgive, in all honesty. But that’s not my role.”

For those in jail, “their walk is their walk, and I believe that we all have . . . consequences of the decisions that we make.”

Face to Faith appears Sundays in the Chicago Sun-Times with an accompanying audio podcast, with additional content, available at chicago.suntimes.com and on iTunes and Google Play.

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http://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/sox-outfielder-melky-cabrera-let-it-be-gods-will-if-we-lose-or-win/#respondThu, 22 Jun 2017 16:00:04 +0000http://chicago.suntimes.com/?post_type=cst_article&p=613859GettySox outfielder Melky Cabrera: ‘Let it be God’s will if we lose or win’Melky Cabrera jokes with players in the Cleveland Indians dugout while on third base during a game June 10 at Progressive Field in Cleveland. | Getty Images]]>

Growing up in the Dominican Republic, there were “hardships,” like not always having enough to eat.

Roughly a third of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean nation, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, lives in poverty, according to the World Bank. Most of the country is Catholic, but his family wasn’t really churchgoing.

Today, he describes himself as a Christian.

****

An aunt gave him a Bible when he was a kid. “I started reading it, and I started looking for God in that instant,” he says in Spanish through a Sox translator.

“At first, I didn’t understand the Bible that much, but I started reading it and learned more. The person who got me the most into it was” a friend who helped him “understand the Bible better and to look for God more.”

“Every day, I read a chapter to keep learning, and I have learned about life, that you have to take advantage of it, that you have to look for God.”

“God exists” and can do “miraculous things.”

****

Cabrera prays quite a bit.

“Before leaving my house. I pray before getting here” at Sox park.

“I pray before the game and after the game.”

What does he pray for?

“For my children, for the world, for my teammates, for the team.”

****

Melky Cabrera watches his hit during a game June 9 in Cleveland. | AP

Believes in helping the needy, and, when he’s back in the Dominican Republic, does what he can.

****

What does God look like?

“The biggest thing in the world. He was the one who created us. He gave us life. To me, it’s the biggest thing in the world. . . . He has given me everything that I’ve asked for.”

What does heaven look like?

“I don’t know.” God is probably is “the only one who knows.”

****

At last check, he was batting around .280, with seven home runs and 40 runs batted in. Last season, he batted close to .300.

“It was God who gave me those skills. I don’t think anyone in the world is born with skills. It’s God who gives” them to people.

****

Melky Cabrera robs the Cubs’ Kris Bryant of a home run on the South Side last July 25. | Getty Images

Doesn’t attend church services often during baseball season. On Sundays, though, “Someone comes to preach” at the ballpark, “and I always go.”

Psalms 23 and 91 in the Bible “have always caught my attention.”

That first psalm, according to one translation, begins, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Another part: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

The other psalm describes God as “my refuge and my fortress.”

****

Do ballplayers ever talk faith and religion in the clubhouse?

“Some of us.”

Cabrera asks God “to always keep me solid” amid his fortune and fame.

He wants his kids to be spiritual.

“I’ve always been a Christian.”

****

Melky Cabrera looks on against the Tigers at a game June 3 in Detroit. | AP

What’s the most important lesson of Christianity?

“Well, following the path of God. I believe in what the Bible says and what the Bible says is happening in the world.”

****

What about the path to victory — does he pray for wins?

“No. I always say let it be God’s will if we lose or win. Always God is the one who commands if one is going to lose or win. I never say that I’m going to win. No. One has to conform to God’s will, whether” that means you win or lose.

“There are a lot of fake religions . . . false religions.”

There should only be “one religion, and that is to follow God.”

CONTRIBUTING: Andrea Salcedo and Amanda Svachula

Melky Cabrera rolls on the ground after avoiding a pitch by Cleveland Indians relief pitcher Bryan Shaw during a game last year in Cleveland. | AP